Thoughts about Engagement

It is really interesting to read Borgmann’s Reality and Technology for Experience Design class right after hearing Jeff talking about how technology should contribute to people’s engagement with society and life. The whole writing is concentrating on how technology should engage people rather than detach. Borgmann uses commodification as a clue to discover the position of technology. In the writing, Borgmann introduces the terms “economically commodified” and “morally commodified.” For morally commodified, he says

So what happens morally when something is commodified? A thing or a practice is morally commodified when it is detached from contexts of engagement with a time, a place, and a community.

After that, when talking about the reverse of commodification, Borgmann uses internet as an example because certain goods are freely available. He states further about these good on internet as:

[…] goods are economically decommodified and yet are morally commodified in most cases, devoid of contexts of engagement with a particular place, time, or community. The lack of communal engagement is often concealed by seemingly intense and frequent communication. But the low cost of entering and leaving an internet relationship is the very mark of moral commodification and makes for short-lived and immaterial connections. The internet can enhance but not produce actual communities.

These words really make sense while I was reading them and thinking about the final project that I’m doing now for methods class. It’s about how online social technologies influence people’s intimate relationship to break up. However, while author states that “disengagement inevitably flattens out the world and shallow a person”, I cannot stop wondering, is engagement that important? Just by reading this refusal of disengagement makes me think about Lao-Tsu. One of his philosophical ideas is to disengage and not act. I’m personally affected by this idea for a long time, and it really promotes and enriches my life instead of turning me shallow. Therefore, if internet is really producing disengagement, can we take advantage of it? Remember, bias and perspective both come from people, while objects and events themselves don’t really have opinions. Can this detachment help us to look into ourselves and grow?

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3 comments

I actually had a few thoughts about that reading with regards to the somewhat new phenomenon of community gardens.

Before I talk about that, I want to briefly discuss something else. One of the things that I was reminded of and really got to me as I was reading is that many Americans have this view of meat for consumption as some kind of inalienable right and any attack on meat producers (even requests to reduce meat consumption) is viewed as a personal slight to many people. Meat production has gotten so commoditized that we’ve lost sight of how it gets to us and what practices go on to produce it, many of which are extremely damaging.

As an example, though it’s not the best, is Jamie Oliver who did an “experiment” with showing children from the UK and the US where their meat comes from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wshlnRWnf30
The result was that both groups were disgusted, yet most of the children from the US still wanted to eat it. While I’m sure the footage was heavily edited, it exemplifies my point that meat has almost totally been separated from the process of production.

I think one thing that the internet has been able to do is empower people to recapture some of the lost power with much of the vegetarian/vegan/raw movements, and most recently the focus on community gardens has really started to change the outlook people have on things.

I’m not sure when I started to change my own views on the subject, but I’ve found that as I’ve learned more about meat production practices, I’ve been consciously reducing my own meat consumption and have been making a larger effort to support local farmers markets.

The reason I bring this up is that a large percentage of the information that I get comes from the internet, which in some ways is the ultimate form of detachment, yet we are currently seeing an attempt to humanize people and things. Kickstarter, for example, pretty much requires a human element as part of the pitch process.

I wonder how we can further use the internet to empower people to work together beyond some of the things that already exist, like DIY culture and food blogs.

I find both of these posts fascinating, although I haven’t read the article that inspired them which may skew my understanding some. It seems that you both ask the question that I summarize as “can the disengagement of internet help people grow/be empowered to make the world a better place?” You can have whatever you want on the internet, to empower or help people grow, but what I find is missing is the motivation factor for getting people to use those sights, and ultimately make the choice to change their habits, and become empowered.

To explain my argument, I will continue using ydreband’s example about meat production. A couple of years ago my wife and I, after seeing a documentary about food production, reading books, and blogs, changed the way we think about food, and chose to only eat meats that are locally grown and from farms that we trust. Thinking back on this change we made, which made our food consumption more expensive, more time consuming, and less convenient, it all started with a friend recommending a documentary for us to watch. We watched it, and seeing the horrible images of how our food reached us motivated us to learn more and ultimately make the change in our lives. The internet played a big role in this, because once we were introduced to this issue, we searched and found a lot of information that helped us grow and empowered us to make the change.

The issue is, all that information was already there, but without the motive to search for it, we never would have found it. And depending on your perspective, the information on the internet isn’t all good for growth and empowerment.

To explain my thoughts on this, I will use an example of a relative’s internet usage. This relative uses the internet to grow and become empowered about conspiracy theories and extremely conservative Christian view points that portray (or did portray during the 2008 Presidential election) Obama as the antichrist. Other examples were that every time a natural disaster (hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes…) hit the USA it was because President Bush did or said something against the nation of Israel. This relative is empowered by the internet and an online community of like minded people to push political, religious, and conspiracy theory agendas to everyone they talk to.

I feel that when considering future ways for using internet as a way to grow and empower groups of people, there should be thought on how to motivate people to seek out growth and empowerment in a socially conscious way. I feel that motivation is key when it comes to growth and empowerment, and we should strive to find ways to get the internet help to create the initial motivation, not only be the place to go after the motivation has begun.

It’s interesting that you mention religious beliefs. This isn’t directly related, but I remember reading somewhere that despite the nearly endless amounts of information available on the internet, people tend to only visit a very small range of sites. It’s unsurprising that people tend to do this with their physical environments (not traveling too far from home) but we do this psychologically as well and create a network of “safe” sites. Go to Alexa and see the top 25 or so sites and see how many of those you visit regularly.

It reminds me of the phenomenon, though I hear about it much less these days, about when Wikipedia was blowing up in popularity, figuratively speaking. People would joke about losing hours to Wiki because one amusing article would link to another and another. You’d start reading about the president, but an hour later you’re reading about Eurasian brown bears. And we’re talking about something that was possible (aside from network infrastructure) almost 20 years ago with basic internet and hyperlinks.

If an interaction as simple as following links can be engaging, I think we can make so many more interactions on the internet engaging and really empower its use. In this case, it was for knowledge, but who knows how much more people could get out of the internet if they could broaden their horizons in terms of activities they learn about and are inspired to do if they could only find reasonably reliable information safely. Now if only we had some sort of way to navigate this internet landscape… or ‘net’scape. Some kind of Netscape Navigator. Yea, that sounds good. (Warning, the link contains images that will offend graphic designers)